Screen?

You could have an XPS M1330 or two EEE 1000's instead!

It's a nice enough lookin' machine that's moderately specced (once it has 2GB RAM or drops Vista for XP). 12" screen machines are a really useful compromise of portability and portability. So I saw this as fitting in somewhere between the EEE 1000 and Dell's own XPS M1330.

But "From" £634 before the UK markup has been added is madness.

An EEE 1000 can now be for less than £300.

The Dell XPS M1330 starts at £629, delivered.

This Dell machine can't credibly claim to be worth anything more than £400.

I own an M1330 (running Vista with no probs, btw) and while it's obviously not as portable as, say, an EEE 901, it's not significantly more massive than this Dell 12".

There's no question that for £600+ I'd bag another M1330 instead of spending money on a weaker machine in every single aspect other than size/weight. But the M1330 is still compact and weighs in at under £2kg. If size/weight is the more critical factor, you could have two EEE 1000's instead!!!

Netbook?

As per your headline, in what parallel dimension could this possibly be described as a netbook? 12" laptops have been around for years. A netbook is something tiny you can just shove in a bag, not something the size of a laptop which just happens to have an underpowered processor.

@ TeeCee - Higher resolution on smaller screens (i.e. lower dot pitch) is a good thing. It means that the screen is more detailed. If you're having to squint to read stuff on it, you need to increase the font size. I love the level of detail on the screen on my Acer Aspire One (9" at 1,024 x 600), and I wish I could get a desktop monitor with a decent dot pitch - 3840×2400 on a 22" screen would do nicely!

Looks useless to me...

There's nothing there that hasn't been around for years. I guess I can quit waiting for it now, I wouldn't buy this thing. Too expensive, and key features of a netbook are that there's no harddrive and it's not Vista. I have a 701 eeePC, and was hoping to see something like it in a 12". The eee's size is nice, but the keyboard and display size are too small to be real useful for me.

Currency craziness

Bear in mind the Japanese price was probably set before the currency markets went mental (the yen is extraordinarily high at the moment), so allowing for that volatility, the UK price may well be (considerably) cheaper than Japan.